Computer Support Blog

Large and medium-sized design teams have to communicate with each other constantly and this leads to enormous amounts of e-mail with design mock-ups and feedback attached.  Sorting through all of this e-mail can potentially be a Herculean task that takes significant amount of time from actual design work.  The problem only compounds itself when you consider that teams often also solicit feedback from investors and developers as well as other team members.  InVision is a cool product that looks to erase this time-sink and help design teams improve their productivity.  InVision provides users with a single environment based in the cloud that connects all the members of a design team.  Teams connected to InVision can upload mock-ups and design documents to the cloud and share them with either the entire team or specific members of it.  The rest of the team can then comment on a document and leave public feedback from which everyone can potentially benefit.  Along with cloud computer support service, this is one of the many applications that advances in cloud computing can provide workplaces.  Read more »

The Internet has severely changed the state of being for independent musicians and artists.  Having a web and social media presence is essential to maintaining your career as an artist if you want to stay independent.  Most successful musicians on the web stick to social media sites such as YouTube and BandCamp to promote and sell their music.  That was not enough for cool person in technology Jack Conte.  Conte worked for years as an independent musician with a heavy web presence, both with his solo projects and with his partner Nataly Dawn in the band Pomplamoose.  Conte has drawn a significant following of fans on the Internet thanks to his popular music videos on YouTube, which reveal how he creates the unique sounds in his music.  However, Conte was not satisfied with promoting his work on a social network while selling it elsewhere.  This is why he founded Patreon, a website that allows users to patronize specific artists and fund them for their continued work. Read more »

It is common for people to have an experience where they remember an item of clothing by its color or pattern, but cannot remember the brand or the store where they purchased it.  ASAP54 is a cool product that solves this conundrum by letting you search through fashion websites and online clothing stores by simply uploading a picture.  If an ASAP54 user wants to find a piece of clothing they see someone wearing, they can just snap a picture, upload it to the app and ASAP54 does all the work.  The app recognizes the image and scours the Internet trying to find visual matches for the item you photographed.  The app provides users with all the matches that it can find, and then lets the user filter further by looking for specific brands, types of clothing, and colors within their results.  Users who have difficulty operating the search filters can always call iPhone support for help navigating the app. Read more »

Compensation in any form is always a powerful motivator, and cool person in technology Jeremy Gelbart counts on that every day as he runs Ultrinsic.  Ultrinsic is a website that allows college students to put up their money for the chance to earn more through their grades.  Essentially, students deposit a certain amount of money to get access to the site.  Once a student has access, they can submit what courses they are taking in a semester and essentially place bets that they will receive A’s in those classes.  When a student comes through and makes the grade, they not only get their deposit back but also a monetary reward and their balance on the site increases.  When students fail to make the grade, Gelbart’s company takes their deposit and places it into a general fund.  Gelbart believes that students can use the site to motivate themselves to perform better and that an immediate monetary stake in their grades will give them a sense of urgency and drive that college students can sometimes lack.  Students that have trouble depositing to the site and submitting their courses should get access to PC tech support for help. Read more »

When Instagram launched in 2010, it changed the way many people approached mobile photography.  While anyone could snap pictures just for themselves and their close friends to see, Instagram offered users a simplified way to make artistic-looking photos that people wanted to share publicly.  Instagram’s filters gave people a sense of performance when taking and uploading their pictures and allowed many people without photo editing skills to feel like pros with their smartphone camera.  Magisto is a smartphone app that wants to recreate this experience on mobile, but this time for video rather than photography.  Magisto is a cool product that lets you upload your mobile videos to its app and choose a “theme” to apply to them.  Each theme dictates an automated editing process, which gives your video a more artistic look.  Themes add different visual filters to your video, not unlike Instagram does with photos, but also actually edits the video itself to make it more dynamic. Those who have have trouble recording videos with their mobile devices can get smartphone IT support to help them with their camera. Read more »

Many education-based tech startups are trying to offer online courses and content directly to students through their own brand and website.  While these companies do occasionally collaborate with certain universities for course content, 2U CEO Chip Paucek is a cool person in technology believes in a different path for online education. Paucek wants to provide universities the tools and resources they need to create their own online degree programs.  Rather than offer online education directly, 2U works with schools to help them provide online classes and degrees to their students through a university’s own site and with a school’s own branding.   Paucek and his company concern themselves with forming complete courses and programs that fit into a genuine degree track rather than offering piecemeal educational content or single classes.  Paucek wants to help colleges utilize online classes to increase their reach and produce substantive courses that are in line with a college’s traditional offerings.  Because of this, Paucek doesn’t market 2U towards the public or students, but rather at universities themselves.  2U provides both technology and consulting to help colleges integrate large-scale online programs into their infrastructure quickly and efficiently. Read more »

New crowdfunding sites seem to pop up every day since Kickstarter blew up on the tech scene.  Most sites focus on one particular industry or type of project that can benefit from the now-popular model.  Almost all of these sites are very capitalistic in nature, looking for backers to support businesses or commercial music, writing, and art.  There is nothing wrong with helping entrepreneurs or artists chase their dreams, but cool person in tech Beth Schmidt believes there’s another group who could benefit greatly from this concept—poor and underprivileged youth.  Beth Schmidt is the founder and executive director of the non-profit Internet company Wishbone.  Wishbone finds promising young people who do not have the resources to pay for the education that would allow them to chase their goals.  Schmidt’s company then provides them a space on the Internet where backers can crowdfund their education.  Rather than use the crowdfunding model to invest in single projects or startup business, Schmidt wants people to invest in a proven resource for society’s future—smart, young students.  Read more »

Spambots, hackers, and other intruding forces constantly create problems for businesses that provide online services and products.  That’s why companies are constantly looking for new solutions to verify their users.  RingCaptcha is a cool product that adds phone verification as a feature for any website or app.  Companies only have to add a few lines of code to their site or program and RingCaptcha automatically integrates phone verification security into their product.  RingCaptcha contacts customers who try to create new accounts or sign in from unfamiliar locations by phone.  By providing these customers specific verification codes by phone, the service confirms that a user’s phone number is both real and their own.  Theoretically, this keeps out spambots or any fake accounts that people create to use for illegal or questionable means.  RingCaptcha means to provide an added security for companies that want to avoid the hassle of illegitimate user accounts and fraud.  Any business that has been the victim of a malware attack, knows how costly office virus removal service can be if they don’t have the proper security measures on their site. Read more »

Having a dedicated platform to promote and sell your art can have a significantly positive effect at any stage of an artist’s career.  Getting access to such a platform early on is particularly helpful in the crowded world of fine art.  That’s why cool person in tech Alex Farkas created UGallery in 2006.  UGallery is an online platform that promotes and sells artwork specifically created by artists who are still young in their careers.  Farkas knew the web could be a powerful tool for leveling the playing field between new artists and established ones.  That’s why when he formed UGallery, he chose to target the emerging crowd of painters, illustrators, and photographers rather than chase after established names in the world of gallery art.  UGallery’s model is dependent on newer artists submitting their portfolios to the curation staff at UGallery, which includes Farkas himself.  UGallery selects the artists they want to promote and then help them set up a presence on their site where they can sell their work to interested buyers.  Buyers who have trouble browsing through choices on UGallery can always contact computer support for help.  Read more »

Crowdfunding has deeply affected the way many people look at their entertainment and the artists who create it.  Where popular art, fiction, music, and even games once only came from monolithic institutions that had a disproportionate amount of say over what the public got to consume, now Kickstarter, Indiegogo and its brethren have made it so the public can access and fund any work they want to see or hear, independently of larger industry trends.  Still, most people consider crowdfunding solely as a way to fund the actual creation of a project, not to directly compensate creators for their work.  This is why most art that people fund on sites like Kickstarter are projects that take large amounts of cash to complete such as albums, movies, comics, and video games.  However, cool product Unbound wants to use the crowdfunding model as an alternative to the book industry and, even more significantly, want to use it to compensate authors directly. Read more »